Greta wrote: ↑Thu May 25, 2017 6:36 am
Yes, and Europe went down, just as the US is doing now.
Indeed, as all empires do. The EU is a mess too.
ABC, CBS and NBC are left wing??? Not in my observation. They are soft right.
I'm seeing in this, and your subsequent comments, that we are in danger of speaking past each other over the old Leftist-Rightist divide. If you're expressing how the terms are used in Oz, I can only tell you it's different here. Here, "Left" means things like advocating big government, minimizing the individual, socialized programs in medicine and welfare, identity politics, softness on crime, weakness on foreign policy...and so on. This makes most of the people you list as "right wing" very decidedly "left wing" over here. And the networks...well, apart from FOX they are all left wing.
But let's not cavil over terms. There would be no point, and it would be boring. Left-Right, whatever. If it looks different from Down Under, it just looks different, I guess.
Individualism will defeat collectivism?
No. Collectivism defeats itself. It's so ideologically-driven and so utterly uninterested in objectivity about human nature that it tends to invent structures that are doomed by their own irrationality. That's why empires fall. They all have feet of clay.
You have no concept of the positive things the EU tried to achieve, always viewing it through the very most jaundiced lens.
Oh, I understand very well what they "tried" to achieve. That's just the point. What they were prepared to do, in order to achieve their "noble goals" is the problem. That's what's always the problem with empire-building: proponents see a "high" goal...call it "Roman Order," "Western Civilization," "the Good Society," "the Third Reich," "The Triumph of the Proletariat," "European Union" or just "the pacification of all mankind"...and because the goal is assumed to be so "high," then if we have to repress, control, conquer or massacre a few minorities to achieve such a goal, then we feel justified.
So we do it. After all, we tell ourselves, objectors are "bad people"; for what other kind of person would stand in the way of our unimpeachably "noble" goals...
At this rate the US will not have any more allies. Let's see how that works out.
I don't think there's a reasonable fear of that.
Again, your very short term view of human history leads you to right wing blinkers.
Short term? Not at all. Look at the whole span. We've gotten better at making stuff, and also at killing each other, it's true. But where's the great moral leap forward?
...today's relatively gentle way of living.
"...relatively gentle"?
See how "gentle" things are in the not-so-quickly-developing world, where two-thirds of the world's population fights for survival every day. Or look at places like China, where, in their desperate rush to modernize, they mass-manage, suppress, pollute, jail, dispossess and kill with complete disregard. How "relatively gentle" is most of the world?
If you haven't been there to see it, I have. I might therefore suggest that maybe additional information may be helpful with that perception.